Here is a statement from the students who yesterday occupied a building in UCL. The occupation is in solidarity with lecturers and other university staff who are the latest subject of attack in the ongoing subordination of the university to the neoliberal consensus.

‘In solidarity with striking lecturers and support staff students from UCL have occupied the Registry – the main administrative wing of the university. As students, we do not have the power to withdraw our labour in solidarity with staff, and so we have decided to occupy in order to fight the current attack on our lecturers’ pay, pensions and conditions. Management may not value the staff at UCL, but we students do.

This is, however, a much broader fight. We are still committed to a fully publicly funded education system and to resisting the privatisation of higher education. Lecturers are suffering this attack because of ideological reforms to the higher education system, implemented under the pretext of a financial crisis that they did not cause. The students and lecturers are what make this university, not the financial managers. We refuse to be divided from our lecturers and treated as disgruntled consumers. The true divide is with management and the ideological destruction of higher education they are complicit in.

We stand with our lecturers. We urge all students to join us in occupation in solidarity with their lecturers. Their fight is our fight.

Last Thursday saw the eviction of students from a University of London building on Bedford Square, London. The space had been occupied for just over a week. It was created as a resource and meeting-place for activists and anyone involved in new social movements to fight the Government’s austerity measures.

These actions show how quickly and unthinkingly the university authorities can turn on their own students.